Growing Up With Holden

No other novel has captured my intrigue, indeed my incessant and undeterred devotion than J.D. Salinger's Cather in the Rye. I read this book in the eighth grade at a boarding school in Deerfield, Massachusetts. It was an English assignment spanning two weeks. I finished it on the first day. After reading the first page, my mind was eerily stolen by the narrator, to use on his own crusade to eradicate the corruption of adulthood.
Being of somewhat similar age and situation, in being both students of Northern prep schools, I connected with Holden on a deeper level. I recalled his words while retrieving imageries from my own school - the hill overlooking the athletic fields, the insides of our dormitory rooms, with hygene utensils strewn about the cubby. The many trips off-campus for sporting events, such as the one where Holden left the fencing equipment on the train, remain incredibly lucid as well.
His disdain for the deception of grown-ups spoke my very feelings at the time, which I had struggled to keep dormant and unspoken for so long. To the two of us, we felt betrayed by the rosy chagrin of childhood. Adults, and indeed our peers, had been so one-dimensional then. And we literally played in the rye fields all day, wholy incognizant of that drop. For me, the rye field had been especially appetitive. I had felt that I could just be, exhuding nonchalantly with existence. I had no worries and remained especially naive all through out my early life.
And, although Holden's "fall" was the result of a weekend stint in New York, my own was more of long slide culminating in disaster. My disenchantment with adults had grown at a steady pace, spurned by the divorce of my parents and my mother's current boyfriend.
On one November morning, while I was in the eleventh grade I was driving out of my neighborhood to school. I saw my friend's car, and we began racing, him ahead and me on his tail. At the intersection, he barely made it in front of an Uhaul-type truck. I was hit and entered a coma for five weeks.
I was in the hospital for a month longer, but from that eery memory forth, I have had to become a different person, more mature, stronger, yet still retaining the essence of me. I have realized that we all fall, but it isn't the kind of mortal fall from a cliff. It is a stumble and we must get back up and continue tredding across life's path.
That was my wake-up call to become an adult and shed the reckless naivete of youth. I am different now than I was back then. Sometimes, I think about Holden, and how he is recuperating from his "fall." I have learned from his mistakes and mine own that your self-image should not be that as important. Life is about doing things for others apart from oneself, and learning to see beauty in even the ugly ducks in Central Park.
Now, I am grown and can only recollect the many connections Holden and I have made throughout the years. In my trips to New York, I walk the path through Central Park, and I imagine Holden, stiffly exalting in his debilitating depression. As I walk on, I know I am leaving him in my tracks, yet another friend fleeing from his painful innocence.